Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday December 12, 2011 @12:37PM
from the forgot-them-in-the-tardis dept.

First time accepted submitter crow writes "Two episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s, thought to have been destroyed in the 1970s, have been found. Both were in the hands of a private collector who didn't know what he had. Like most episodes of the time, these were half-hour shows, part of a four-part story, and portions of both stories are still missing."

You know, if the FTL neutrinos are real, then there is every possibility that the episodes are on their way to a rescue point in the future right now. There could be a time machine in transit at this very moment, recovering this lost cultural icon for our enjoyment, as soon as they land in the recovery era.

If I were a time-traveller, you can bet that my first stop would be the 1960s, to rescue the lost episodes.

My second stop, of course, would be the mid-to-late 1930s, to have a drink with Hitler and get to know him and then decide whether I have a moral duty or even moral right to kill him.

If FTL travel is possible, we could just travel out N light years from Earth and pick up the signal from the original broadcast. Of course, the signal's probably degraded too far for it to be recognizable.

If I were a time traveler, my first stop would be the local convenience store a couple weeks ago, to pick up a "lucky" lottery ticket. Or maybe South Africa a few millenia ago, when there was no De Beers to stop me. It's not as convenient as Corwin's shadow from The Guns of Avalon, where he just picked the

Of course, the signal's probably degraded too far for it to be recognizable.

Yeah, 'cause that's the only problem with the [FTL travel] plan...;)

You don't need FTL at all. You simply locate a planet around a distant star system- or some other extrasolar object- at a distance of 24 or slightly more light years, then detect the (admittedly quite small) proportion of the original TV transmission that travelled out there, bounced off that object, and is now heading back in our direction, due to reach us 45 to 50 years after it first went out.

You may need one of those mains-powered antenna/aerial amplifiers for this to work properly;-)

Talk about a cosmic coincidence- literally a couple of minutes after I'd posted the above, I become aware of this spoof article [rimmell.com] while reading this comment [slashdot.org].

I can only swear that I thought that one up without ever having seen that article (and some time ago as well), though I'd be surprised if others hadn't come up with a similar idea independently as well.

And how are you going to sell a large quantity of diamonds with no legal background? I wouldn't want to be involved with the kind of people who fence that kind of thing....picky, I know, I just prefer the lottery idea.

easy...go to the time of the civil war in the US.Make a big to do about the boatload of diamonds on the ship (of which there are a few, the rest still in your FTL timeship). Sink the ship in a reasonable depth of water.Travel to the time you want to start selling them.Go on a treasure finding mission."find" the "lost" diamonds that you retrieved from your FTL timeship.-nB

it seems like going back to a recent lotto drawing would be relatively non-disruptive to the timestream.at worst the actual winner(s) would have to split the jackpot with you, and if there was no winner, the only effect is on the future: the jackpot for the next drawing wouldn't be as large.you can easily blend in with the society of a few days ago

as opposed to going back a few millenia for diamonds, or going back a couple decades/centuries to invest in some big company early on - who knows what ripple effe

You do know, of course, that there's an entire division of the Time Corps that does nothing but stop people from killing Hitler? Without the Nazi invasion of Russia, Stalin took all of Europe, most of Africa and parts of Asia in World War II (which began in 1937 with the Soviet invasion of China and the subsequent Soviet annexation of Poland in 1939). Fighting between the Japanese (who were also invading China) and the Soviets prevented the Japanese from attacking Pearl Harbor, and the United States didn'

So, what you're saying is that if I kill Hitler, then in a really roundabout way, I prevent 9/11?

Also, I didn't even say I was going ti kill Hitler. I was going to get to know him. I doubt I'd have the guts to kill him, especially once I know him, so the Time Corps has nothing to worry about.

Also, I think you mean there was a division of the Time Corps. Or will be, depending on your point of view. But they have to be an organization started in the relative future, who are patrolling the relative past, s

You know, if the FTL neutrinos are real, then there is every possibility that the episodes are on their way to a rescue point in the future right now.

Look, you might think the copy protection on Blu Ray is a pain, but wait until you get a load of the confusingly-named Hyperspatial Digital Causality Protection that the unelected cartel of the Time Lords require on any temporally displaced media. I mean, one can downgrade your nice 1080p to standard def, but that's not as bad as the headache you get when the real HDCP cuts in and makes you never have been going to see the video you just watched.

My second stop, of course, would be the mid-to-late 1930s, to have a drink with Hitler and get to know him and then decide whether I have a moral duty or even moral right to kill him.

Future Kryten: Kryten, we're epicures now. We travel through history enjoying the very best time has to offer.Future Rimmer: Dolphin sweetmeats, roast suckling elephants, baby seal hearts stuffed with dove pate. Food fit for emperors!Future Lister: We socialize with all of the greatest figures in history -- the Hapsburgs, the Borgias...Future Kryten: Why, only last week, Louis the Sixteenth threw a banquet especially in our honour.Future Rimmer: The man is a complete delight -- urbane, witty, charming...Kryten: He was an idiotic despot who lived in the most obscene luxury while the working classes starved in abject poverty.Future Rimmer: Well, we certainly didn't see any of that while we were there!Future Kryten: And his wife's an absolute cutie.Future Cat: I think they're our favourite hosts. If you don't count the Hitlers.Kryten: The who?!Future Rimmer: Providing you avoid talking politics, they're an absolute hoot.Kryten: You're good friends with the Hitlers?!Future Kryten: It's just a social thing. We don't talk about his work. We just have a few laughs, play canasta, and enjoy the odd game of mixed doubles with the Goerings.Kryten: I don't believe what I'm hearing!Future Rimmer: Look, you have to understand -- we travel back and forth throughout the whole of history, and naturally we want to sample the best of everything. It's just a bit unfortunate that the finest things tend to be in the possession of people who are judged to be a bit dodgy.Kryten: Herman Goering is a "bit dodgy"! What has become of you all? You've all abandoned your morals, been seduced by power and wealth. All you're interested in now is indulging your carnal desires.Future Rimmer: And could we tell you some stories about _that_!Kryten: I don't recognize any of you! You're just amoral self- serving _scum_, freeloading your way through history!Future Kryten: Good grief! I can't believe I used to be such a stuck-up pompous prig.

Actually, what we need is an alien from the planet Omicron Persei 8 (they'd actually have to be closer because that is 1000 light years away) to have recorded all of Earth broadcasts and be willing to give us a copy of them.

People assume that Doctor Who chronology is a strict progression of one episode to the next, but actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff.

Theres a list of missing episodes on this website [paullee.com] but it hasn't yet been updated to include the new discoveries. With the finding of "The Underwater Menace" part 2, we now have a new "earliest surviving episode to feature Patrick Troughton." Hopefully the BBC can do their usual magic to restore these episode...there are apparently bits missing.

Given that so much of the first and second doctor were basically kids serials with low production value, I am not as occupied with these episodes as I once was. I own and watch many of these early episodes, and pretty much agree there is a good reason why most of the doctor reruns shy from these early episodes. While there are a few that are remarkable, most seem to suffer from the 'have to get an episode out not matter how lame' syndrome. It is instructive to look at how many episodes were shot for tho

Well, be fair. The first season, at least, was entirely funded on the basis that it was educational material for kids (it's the only way the light entertainment department would pay anything for it at all) and so naturally that's exactly what it looks like. But, having said that, it is precisely for that reason that the early episodes have a high sci-fi value -- the history was usually well-researched and the science was generally provided by a scientific advisor (Kitt Peddler, for example). The later stori

Given that so much of the first and second doctor were basically kids serials with low production value

How is that different from the fifth?I'm not knocking the talents of anyone there because they all did better before and/or later, but it was a step firmly back into very low budget and rushed childrens television with a fad or two thrown in. It's a bit of a let down to see it after the Tom Baker/Douglas Adams combination and almost only "The Five Doctors" shows that they could have done better with a dec

I believe they recovered scenes from a lot of lost episodes from Australia. What happened is that the censors were quite strict in Australia, but as part of censoring episodes, they kept the clips that they cut.

All the lost episodes have fan-made recreations, using the original soundtracks (people recorded them when they broadcast), still photos taken during the filming, and recovered scenes. Some of them are pretty good, though most are painful to watch.

They almost never used photos from the filming, they used telesnaps which were made from the film copies in the BBC Archives (distinct from the mag tape copes the BBC mentions in the article). Two copies were supposed to be kept of every program broadcast over a period of time, after that period the Archives would retain the film copy and the BBC would reuse its tape.

The only episode never to have been transferred onto tape was Feat of Stephen from Dalek Masterplan.

The recovered episodes are broadcast versions from Australia, which had bits censored out of them. The Australian censorship board was very diligent about filing the sections they snipped out, however, so those segments still exist, we just didn't have the rest of the episodes until now. Now they can rejoin the edited version + copies of the censored sections and have two completed episodes.

"The recovered episodes are broadcast versions from Australia, which had bits censored out of them."

Are you kidding me? Please pay attention that I come from a country with a dictatorship back then. Are you truly telling me there were something to be censored out of a Dr. Who episode from the sixties!? I think even Franco would be surprised to know.

Actually, yes. Australia was fairly bad about it back then, though the US could be worse at times. Probably one of the most edited scenes was with body bits oozing out of a Cyberman in Tomb of the Cybermen, but stories featured drug taking (Aztecs), assassinations (Romans), religious extremism (Crusades) and other stuff that we'd think nothing of today but was really shocking back then.

Probably the most heavily-edited story was Masterplan, where episode 7 was entirely edited out of all foreign sales by the

I only saw "The Brain of Morbius" (4th Doctor) for the first time this year because the entire story was deemed unsuitable for broadcast. That story is basicly Dr Who meets Frankenstein without much in the way of horror, so I suspect the weirdos that demanded it not be broadcast were really objecting to the segments that made fun of strange religeous cults.Censorship "for the children" as cheap populist politics has a long history in Australia.

In October 1996, Australian Doctor Who fans Damian Shanahan and Ellen Parry discovered a collection of the censored clips – several from missing episodes which do not exist in their entirety – in the records of the National Archives of Australia.[12] The clips had been sent by the Commonwealth Film Censorship Board (now the Office of Film and Literature Classification) to the Archives as evidence of the required edits having been made.

Man, that doctor who series is so damn expensive. I have a complete known collection of stargate, sanctuary, star wars, and others I can't think at the moment, but when I walk past the movie isle at frys, and I see the price and size of DR WHO, I just keep walking every time. That's the fucking truth.

I dunno, if you include the Big Finish material then there's quite a healthy stockpile of episodes. Do an animated "reconstruction" (it's not a real reconstruction since there was never any video) in the same way fans have done for things like Evil of the Daleks -- or as Chatsworth Hall did for The Invasion -- and you've got a "proper" episode.

I have the same feeling about the various Trek series. They're over $70/season (single data point of TOS season 1 on Amazon). If they were in the $20-ish/season range of most shows, I'd likely buy them all, even though I admittedly don't re-watch things often.

(...and I hope "Blake's 7" is released on DVD or BluRay in the US at some point.. It's another one I'd love to collect.)

Across the pond, the American film industry routinely destroyed films after they had been run through theatres in the 1930's, 40's and 50's. Storing film required space and controlled atmosphere so many originals were burned in backlots rather than keep them. Most studios had no plan to redistribute or broadcast on television. Such was their vision. Makes the whole MPAA issue over copying sound laughable, doesn't it?

it wouldn't surprise me if you actually did find a few people mixed in with the canisters. It may be urban legend, but it's still widely held that organized crime in the UK was very much linked to motorway construction back then, particularly in regards to concealing those that they'd made missing.

Not only that, but pre-1940's nitrate film [wikipedia.org] was actually very dangerous to keep around in archives. Keeping highly unstable and flammable film stock around in your archive was like storing your valuable book collection amongst a bunch of oily rags and gasoline cans.

Very true, and it is widely circulated (I've posted links elsewhere) that at least one round of junking was due to a request from the fire department to do something about the highly combustible archives they had. Please note that the prevailing belief is that there was more than one round of junking - probably at least two - at the BBC Archives (as opposed to BBC Central, which only housed the magnetic tape copies) and the different accounts are likely explained by being references to different events rath

Worse was to come. Universal Studios actually held on to a few audio and film recordings, then digitized them. Very old tape and film degrades, requiring baking to turn the tape into something usable, which can destroy the original after transfer. It never does the original any good, after a run-through. The fire at Universal Studios a few years back destroyed all of their remastered material - which, annoyingly, they'd failed to back up anywhere and had totally failed to release. That which they'd actually

These are the accepted accounts - two junkings (one for fire safety reasons, one to make space) with absolutely nothing to do with contracts or magnetic tapes (beyond BBC central not having a copy) - along with a description of the transfer from video to film.

As far as I'm concerned, the current BBC description is a highly edited description of the events with NO mention

Yep. It was a money saving exercise: storing tape for long periods, in a condition that will play again when you ask the too, requires care, effort and space - none of which are free. That and new tape cost money too: they could be wiped and reused a few times before being destroyed so there was a secondary saving here. Someone high enough up suggested getting rid of these particular tapes and the BBC bureaucracy being what it was (and perhaps still is?) no one further down questioned the wisdom as they pas

All the content was on film, through the telerecordings process. Overseas sales were done exclusively through film, not video, so all episodes (barring Feast of Stephen) were telerecorded onto film for sales. These telerecordings were held in the BBC Archives. The magnetic tape copies held temporarily by the BBC were in part because editing film is a bastard and it's hard to add effects. The initial masters were therefore mag tape, but once the recordings were telerecorded (re-mastered) onto film, the mag t

what amazes me more is that the media are still trying to crack down on people who copy movie's and tv shows. yet here we are the bbc is 'relying' on those 'same' people they call 'pirates' to refill their own archives which they purged of stuff they thought was worthless. maybe they should just let people copy, for at least the reason being if the official archives are lost or destroyed there are copies to restore them.

To be fair, the BBC are far more pragmatic about copying than most other broadcasters. For example, Top Gear is the most downloaded show on the internet, and they've referenced this fact a couple of times in the show. The only action I've ever known them to take over that is to shut down a few websites who hosted every single episode ever, which was frankly taking the piss just a little bit anyway.

Nonetheless, when The Lion was found in New Zealand, the finder was served with a copyright infringement statement by the BBC lawyers. (See the Slashdot story on the subject.) Pragmatic they may be, polite --- not so much. They need to work on that part.

I'd also note that the BBC version of events on the missing episodes makes no mention of the telerecordings or the BBC Archives and is highly revisionist. This demeans, quite considerably, the efforts of collectors, fans and studios alike who go to a great d

In light of how woefully sparse iPlayer is in terms of the BBC's back catalogue (take a look [bbc.co.uk]) I'd like to see a test case of a UK resident sharing programmes with their countrymen. In principle, I don't see how Aunty could complain about us sharing between ourselves what we've already paid for. By way of comparison take a look at 4oD, another catch-up service from another free* UK broadcaster.

Of course, ensuring that only UK residents can access such a P2P system, there's the rub.

The BBC Archives junked a lot of its black-and-white archives on the grounds that nobody watches that stuff. There is some disagreement over whether the archives were junked once or twice. The BBC article linked to notes that the BBC itself reused mag tape recordings -- whilst this is true, it is extremely disingenuous, as the BBC is not the same thing as the BBC Archives. The BBC Archives used film - the telesnaps that exist are photos taken directly off the film copies.

I agree, but as a BBC license fee payer - when I was still living in the UK - I feel entitled to denigrate the BBC all I like after the cancellation of Blake's 7 and The Tripods, and doubly so after they considered Eldorado to be the height of entertainment. Sorry, the BBC Controllers can say what they like about sci-fi, but B7 and Tripods were highly rated and widely sold, Eldorado was neither. (it had, what, 5 viewers?) I will never, ever forgive the BBC for considering a pathetic, unwatched soap as super

Perhaps, but think of it this way -- they *could* have sold tapes instead of trashing them. Which is cheaper - holding an auction that would likely recoup the costs of the process and may even help fund new work, or piling the tapes into trucks and driving them to a landfill?

It would also have been cheaper to offer tapes to cast and crew (many of whom are now known to have "lifted" tapes that were set aside for being junked). There's no cost involved letting employees drive at their own costs to the archive

I can say from experience that it's often cheaper, from a liability and general management stand-point, to simply destroy something that it is to facilitate giving it away. I guess you'd be surprised how much of a clusterfsck giving something away can be. You have to deal with tons of requests, people complaining they didn't get what they want or should be first. If it's a physical give-away you need to handle physical security, crowd control, inventory, liability insurance. It's cheaper to just chuck i

Copyright is free for the first 10 years. A fee is charged for the next 10. Renewals are technically unlimited, but the fee increases each time. Enough information will be published with a work that you can verify a work's copyright status online. If it can't be tracked down, it's fair game. Well, unless you stole an unfinished manuscript or something(need some wording to distinguish between protected 'work in progress' and 'abandoned'). In any ca

You might as well include an high quality analog copy too for mediums where that is possible and makes sense - 35 or 70mm for film, master quality phonograph for audio, bound copy for ebooks - this way if the player becomes obsolete or suffers bit rot, there will be a trivial to recover analog copy to fill in the missing gaps.

I considered that, which is why I didn't actually specify 'digital', simply giving examples. I want digital over analog because you can make a 100% perfect copy even over multiple generations, and 35/70mm film, for example, is on it's way out(though it still has a long life remaining, it's a bit past middle age).

Though you do bring up a good point - For copyright to be applicable, the LoC has to be provided the highest quality masters available, especially if it's going to be analog - Let the studio keep t

I was implying I wanted one of each - a copy of the work in its preferred analog or digital form, and a secondary copy in the other form at the highest quality conversion now available for future proofing - see NASA's issues when they found the moon landing tapes but didn't have a player that could play them. I choose film and phonograph because they are so simple to play back that no esoteric knowledge such as how vertical helix scan works or just what the heck side scan was is needed to recover informati

I'd add one further clause: "Copies that are made purely for archival purposes but never played in public OR in private are exempt from copyright, provided the conditions of the exemption are wholly and provably adhered to. Copyright is retroactively applied for the entire duration of the existence of copies allegedly made for archival purposes but then used in violation of the exemption clauses."

This would make collecting (where playing isn't generally the point) both safer and on sounder legal ground, whi

This would make collecting (where playing isn't generally the point) both safer and on sounder legal ground, which in turn would boost the material preserved.

True, but consumers don't typically get their media in formats with good longevity, especially today, which is why I want to task the LoC with it. Of course, short of rewriting copyright law all by myself, it's always going to remain an incomplete scenario.

Can anybody answer how much should storing 50 GB of data(blu-ray max), with 99.9999999% reliability per year cost, in a massive warehouse scenario? It cannot be 'lost', 'misplaced', or discarded. It needs to be accessable by equipment readily available

That's a very good question. The digital media with the longest lifespan is based on core and gives you a 100 year lifespan (generally considered "archival quality" in physical formats) but it's horribly expensive to build core-based memories and even modern derivatives are usually bulky.

Only if you want the version as broadcast. A more complex, but superior, solution would be to use time travel to break into the studios, hardware hack the cameras to use high dynamic range, high resolution CCDs and wirelessly transmit the feed from that to a storage device concealed in the room. You then merge the video recorded footage (which will include all the SFX and edits) with the high quality video to produce a cinema-grade version of each episode.

"Missing, Presumed Wiped" is a superb conference. Probably the most remarkable recovery of theirs was the episode "Girl on the Trapeze" of "The Avengers" as the surviving recording notes had indicated that this had never been transferred onto film - and thus it was presumed lost forever.

It is likely that a few more episodes will be recovered -- I really, really want the whole of Evil of the Daleks! -- and I would not be surprised if there's at least one more completed story in the archives by 2020. However,

The Prisoner was made by an English studio, written and played by an English actor, and location footage was in North Wales. It's thus 2/3rds English, 1/3rd Welsh.

if you like The Prisoner, then early Who might actually appeal to you. My suspicion is that you've only (or primarily) exposes to JNT's travesty of an era, or the later debacles that claim to be Who but clearly aren't. (The TARDIS has no scanner, no blast doors, no HADS -- for crying out loud, it doesn't even have the internal hum! That proves, be

Particularly in the case of long-running sci-fi series such as Dr Who, I like to remind people that it had many eras and many styles, that disliking (or even being allergic to) one style doesn't necessarily mean the rest will provoke the same reaction. It's not a case of trying to push the series onto others, it's more a case of not wanting people to be deprived of making a choice. (When you don't know the choice is there, you can't make it.) The series isn't for everyone, even with the diverse style